Happy Birthday F.M. Alexander, founder of The Alexander Technique. I've read your books and interviews with your students, and even have an old zine you made in the 1890's called The Human Voice: Speaking and Singing. Seems like you were a terribly interesting and wonderful man. You put your whole being into teaching and all you cared about was for humans to improve in a real, meaningful, holistic way.
Your technique got me out of chronic pain, so thank you!
Raymond Dart (1893-1988) is primarily known for his discovery in 1924 of the so-called missing link, the skull of what is called the Taung child, that he named Australopithecus africanus. Australian by birth, Dart emigrated to London after graduating from medical school in Sydney in 1917. He was appointed Professor of Anatomy at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1922 and in 1926 became dean of the medical school there. He retained the post until his retirement in 1958. In 1943, Dart and his family had Alexander Technique lessons with F. M. Alexander’s assistant, Irene Tasker. Dart had a single lesson with Alexander himself in 1949 and maintained that Alexander influenced him for the rest of his life. In March 1970, Dart delivered the F. M. Alexander Memorial lecture titled “An Anatomist’s Tribute to F. Matthias Alexander” to the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique in London. He died in Johannesburg in 1988 at the age of 95.
From The Dart Procedures
See also: The Double Spiral Arrangement of the Human Musculature
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Raymond Dart is a very significant figure in the study of human evolution and in the development of the Alexander Technique. Dart was born in Australia in 1893. By 1924 he was working as an anatomist at a University in South Africa. He had been interested by some baboon skulls a student had shown him and requested more be sent from the limestone quarry in Botswana. The chunks of rock supposedly arrived as Dart was dressing in white tie and tails to be best man at a wedding. The rocks deserved this honour for one lump contained a child’s skull and the cast or mineral impression of its braincase, now thought to be between one and two million years old. The fossil is known as the Taung Child (from the name of the quarry). Dart named it Australopithecus afarensis (Southern ape of Africa). This find, a miracle of good fortune, in its preservation and the special qualification of its discoverer, was significant in several important ways.
Dart encountered Alexander’s work, in South Africa in 1943, through Irene Tasker, one of the earliest teachers authorised by Alexander. Dart was already fifty. He tells how he had “a series of daily demonstration of Alexander’s self-analytical technique. She… revealed to me how my own malpostured habits of sitting, standing, walking and lying down could be bettered, by her manipulating my moving body concurrently with my consciously inhibiting that wrongful ‘intermeddling with reflex details’ of such activities, mentioned by Sherrington” (SP p 122). The reference is to Charles Sherrington, the famous English physiologist who researched the nature of reflexes and their contribution to voluntary movement. Once Irene Tasker departed for England shortly afterwards, Dart, both for himself and his infant son who had movement impairment, soldiered on in the slow and patient exploration of his structure and functioning in movement, his ‘malpostured habits’ as he called them. He even included his daughter’s ‘night terrors’ as another manifestation of malposture. Fear is the key.
In the 1940’s, following his introduction to the Alexander Technique, Dart wrote three articles for Journals in South Africa which brought together what he had learnt through his own practice with the Alexander Technique with his own expertise in human anatomy, evolution and development. This was another fortuitous conjunction. Just as the limestone block in 1924 had required months of patient removal of rock to expose the find, so now Dart took great pains to unearth what was going on in himself, and thereby to give a developmental foundation to the Alexander Technique. He also found a way of bringing an understanding of the dynamics of anatomy alive through self-exploration in movement and stillness.
